


Grunion Run

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: Every Crook and Granny - Unrelated Seadweller Reproduction & Junk [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Dubcon Cuddling, Dubious Consent, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Grubs, Kink Meme, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Multi, Sea Trolls, Spawning Season, implied oviposition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 12:06:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4834712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kinkmeme Prompt (XXI:16): At a certain time each sweep, all of-age seadwellers flop onto the beaches and dig themselves into the sand. Landdwellers may, if they are so inclined, head down to the shore to catch themselves a prince or princess.</p><p>*</p><p>The seafolk are singing and below there are always takers for what is on offer. Below there are participants, and voyeurs, and vendors with refreshments. On the cliffs, Aradia thumbs on her recorder and settles in to try to puzzle out an ancient written language from only these few come-hither calls. It is an impossible task. She is enjoying herself immensely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A beginning:

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cthchewy (pyrrhic_victoly)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrrhic_victoly/gifts).



> PV, don't be peeved!  
> Now you know what I was doing instead of working on Hello FlailKat.  
> Take this, in all its weird melodramatic glory.  
> I shall return to my cave holding out hope for bubblenest fills and other weird, endearing fish behavior.

**A beginning:**

He feels the pull of the two moons, full now, like a path of moonlight over the calm waters. He surfaces and the path is there, like an easy stroll. Inviting.

He is a prince of the water. Why would he wish to walk when he can dive like the deep sea squid, sing like the dolphin pods, idly hunt the teeming sweeps of little fish so that they swirl away and back, his own eyes and senses the only thing to witness his art?

He is a prince of the oceans, and a lone hunter. He resents the pull that tells him to walk out of the water and into the night air, up the shore, to dig into the sandy beach and sing until another joins him.

The shore is in view. He can hear the singing, hundreds of his kind, all loners, now in the brief nights in which they share space and do not aggress but rather try to impress, to lure, to convince one another to lie with them. By day they will swim down into the insulating water, hunting while the sun rules the sky. Some may match during that time, walk out of the water together to mate on the sands and go their separate ways again.

He burns, under the water, in the sight of the moons. He burns and he turns away from the moonlit path, strikes out for the shadows of the cliffs instead. Until now, he has swum easily. Now, turned from the pull, each stroke is an effort. He grits his teeth and growls into the water, drowned out by singing, and he swims down, down into a darkened cave, threading through narrow passages, dragging himself out of the water where he shivers in the dark air, but does not feel the singing in his bones, barely hears the singing through the air, the thin cracks of the cliff above like the tunnels below.

*

She is sitting on the cliffs, listening to the distant sound of the seafolk singing. It is the first double full moon of the spring, when the waters are at their highest and the seafolk come to shore to claim their due. She is from the plains, and not the coasts, but she knows the ritual well from her research. For three nights, a landdweller may walk among the water folk and not drown. For three nights, the ocean folk will lay with whomever is willing and not drag them into the depths to be devoured.

Even now the small tent city on the other end of the estuary has almost emptied out, trolls of all colors streaming down to the beach to catch themselves a lover, to watch and laugh as the proud princesses and princes of the sea roll on the sand like a frenzied mating of animals, to stand well back and sell refreshments.

She didn’t come for any of those reasons. She came to listen.

The songs of the ocean folk run throughout the riddles of the ruins she reads in far distant digs, but the sea folk only sing here. Only on this beach, in this season, for these three nights. She has three nights to record and the rest of the sweep to try to puzzle it out, this most ancient of troll tongues.

It is an impossible task, but she is rust, and when she Ascends in two and a half sweeps, there will never again be time for idle hobbies. She will always be on duty, or else there will be no self left to regret the ever present duty. The helmsman is the ship.

She sits on the cliff and listens, her equipment recording, to the sound of hundreds, to the vast distant orgy of the highest of the high and to the landdwellers who would see them as something other than superior officers when they rule the fleets. If she looks up, there are the moons, and the stars are hidden in their light. She stays all night, and when dawn comes, she has worked her way down a chimney vent into the cliffs, down, down, into the darkness of the sheltering cliffs.

*

He doesn’t hear her at first. All he hears is his own pulse, the pounding like surf against the shore, the pounding in his head a pain, “go ashore, go ashore, _it is Time_ ”. He’s young yet, there will be two or more such sweeply cycles before his lot is called to Ascend. He might need to deliver a live grub to prove his viability and take his captaincy, but he will spawn next sweep, or the sweep after. He has duties, and he cannot imagine fulfilling them with a grub in tow.

 _Just a little more time_ , he thinks, rocking back and forth, as if he can contain this tide, this pull within him. The sea folk are not raised to pray. He can out-swim and spear a shark twice his length and four times his weight, he can navigate the full circumference of the aging planet, he has submitted to the sweep of sailing across the surface as required of his kind, but he does not know how to ask for help, only that he must not, that he must be the thing that causes others to quail and beseech mercy.

He does not hear her. The first thing he notices is the light.

 *

The first thing that she notices is the sound, a thin high whine at the edge of her hearing. It swoops up, up, and sometimes down enough that she can almost decipher…

She realizes that it sounds like the sea folk singing, but this time, if it means, _I am here_ and _please_ and _come_ , it also means someone in pain. _Please, no_. She stops for a moment, in the cool but not wet darkness of the twisting paths, switches her light off and listens. Her eyes adjust, but there is still nothing to see, only total darkness. She hears the crunch of sand and the whine in the distance, the distance itself hard to judge with the winding of the tunnels, and if she has killed for her own safety, she has also helped for her own sense of self. She turns the light back on and edges her way further down.

*

They speak that day, the violet princeling and the dirt-digging landwalker. He rocks in the sand and bites off answers to her questions like they are fish to be disciplined for plaguing him with their impertinent presence. She asks him questions and does not edge closer.

He crawls to her, and he does not notice.

*

This is the point of the story when you may ask, but did they do it?

Did she raise her skirt? Did he surrender to the moons’ pull? Did their colors intermingle into that most rare fuchsia on the sandy floor of a dark cave?

That would be the wrong thing to ask.

Did they want to?

No.

That is the important thing.

*

(Each and every twisting, reaching body on that open beach holds a story, a person, a why. In a sense they are all there for one reason. In another, each has their own.)

*

He edges closer and closer again, until she finds his head against her thigh, and then over it. When he clutches his knees he trembles and his strength shakes her. If he thrashed against her his horns could gut her. It is a good thing that explorers come prepared. Her steel-boned vest protects her, little knives at her beck. She does not use them.

She plunders his knowledge ruthlessly. She asks no more than he gives.

Her hands sink into his hair and pet until she wins it almost free of salt. She spends some of her precious freshwater on it and he sighs for a moment and stops shivering at the crawl of it over his scalp. She pets the softness of it, the only soft thing about the length of his hard skin plates and long bones and strong muscles. He surrenders to her and answers now into the silence of the cave.

She runs the recorder, although she cannot think that she will forget a thing now. They have moved on from singing, from the calls and their responses, to the way that the two formats, spoken and written diverged and went their separate ways. It would be impossible to learn it all, to explain it all, in one day. She plucks it from him like she is spinning her mother’s coat into thread, pluck, pluck. She will weave it into a story, she will write a research paper and leave it unsigned.

She will dare to leave something of herself behind, stripped of color, to be used for its worth and not origin. His stripe is softer than the rest, undercoat to guard-hairs. She imagines clipping a lock to prove his existence, to prove hers. In the cave there is no time, no sun, no moons, only two voices, two uncomfortable bodies, the circle of light. 

He sings her a chant-song, a mythology she’s heard before, but with a different spin. She eats a sandwich and shares the other, one bite at a time, into his bear-trap teeth. They are almost to the second night. He is losing his sharpness, he cannot maintain the iron-willed aggression of the predators of the deep. He turns and does not bare his teeth as he nuzzles into her. He has cracked entirely open. She could ask him anything. He is still himself, but he wants to please.

She learns that this is his first season. There will be three. There will be at least three.

She leaves him at nightfall, though the parting is hard on his part. She returns with food, fresh, hot, expensive food from the vendors past the estuary. He has eaten through her stores, gulped her freshwater as if he lived in a watery desert. He sweats like he is melting.

She is a psionic, she flies fast. He greets her with a whine and almost tackles her in his haste to reestablish their connection. She feeds him as he talks, answers her questions. He is content so long as he can touch her.

Two nights previous he would have scorned her. Tonight all he can think of is how warm she is and how cold the cave is. He tries a come-hither call for the first time, and she catches his wandering hand and returns it to his lap. He shudders and now she knows from their conversations that this whine is also a supplication call. She pets his hair again, hooks a finger over his nearest horn and pulls to the length of it, starts again, traces his ears and his unfairly long lashes, the march of gills down his neck. The fever-tide recedes, pale supplanting flush. The burning is an internal kernel, an ember without air. He tries to bury it. He is limp upon her lap. Eyes closed he answers her questions, sometimes asks one back, coherency a thread through a labyrinth, a thread that he must follow or loose. There is something in the labyrinth he does not wish to meet. 

*

On the third night, he can barely speak.

*

On the third night he shudders and cannot answer, he rocks and it is a different motion. She tries her own come-hither call, not quite accurate with only lungs, and he manages one word, _please_. That night she strokes him until he calms, but the soft slickness under her hand is not his hair. She feels affection but does not allow for lust, at least so far as one can control such things. The troll with whom she’s spoken is not really there. There is nothing to do but care for the husk until he returns to resume custodianship of his vessel. She cleans him after, tucks him back together, knowing his pride well now. It is not pity. Her deviance is only in her compassion. Perhaps, if the sharply proud mind she met on the first night had _asked_ …

*

He starts to regain himself the third day, shuffles to the water and dives in, desperate to clean himself. Of what precisely, he will not admit.

*

She packs and waits for nightfall, spends time organizing her notes, and if they do not include anything of _what_ they have done together, only words and sounds, two voices in the dimming light, the sheer honesty of them is intimate.

She is surprised when he returns before nightfall. He does not return to the place by her side. Tonight, most of the landdwelling lovers will see no more of their brief paramours, though a few will return for a night of lovemaking outside of their implacable biological imperative. A few will return only to tempt their lovers to drown. It happens every sweep. 

*

It is daylight, but he swims quickly and the ocean is deep enough at the cave’s entrance. He does not have to return. He goes because the past three nights have been veiled in a current of darker water. He goes because surely her face cannot be so dear, her voice so compelling. It is only the madness of the moons. He goes because if only he can _understand_ , then he can bury it, smother it, drown it. Two more sweeps. Perhaps three. Once he is in space, the moons will not speak to him. Surely he can skip next sweep, find a cave far below, shudder his way through the awful span of time, carry on in willful ignorance. He is healthy. There is no reason that he cannot wait until the third sweep. None.

The youngest parents are more likely to die anyhow.

The youngest are the first to lose their grubs, to have to try again, and sometimes again.

He won’t need the practice.

(He cannot afford the liability.)

*

Her face is a riddle.

Her voice lacks song.

She is rust.

He hadn’t really noticed.

She watches him and he can tell she is wary, not aggressive, but not dismissive of his might, his potential to aggress. Perhaps that is the final knot to the strange net about him.

“Next swweep,” he starts, and stops. It is foolish to pursue her. There are better matches, eight ranks of them, nine counting the singular Heiress who is not pulled by the moons. He should not _feel_ gentle for having felt gentleness. It is only that she saw his vulnerability, the first to do so since his lusus, and she did not strike into the soft meat of it but wrapped the wound of it until it could heal.

This is foolishness. Why would he waste a sweep? Why her? Still, if the grub is unsuitable, there is always the third sweep. In this, it is only success that counts, however failure rankles.

“Next swweep, wwill you be here?” he manages, and she is cruel, and asks him why.

“I wwould lay wwith you.” He holds his head high, and his ears proclaim the gift he bequeaths.

“Why should I?” She asks, and it is not a challenge, only a question. It is a terrible challenge. He has grown used to honesty but had no time to grow used to its practice outside the madness. He is embarrassed.

“I wwill answwer your questions.”

“That would take far longer than three days and nights.”

“I wwill not come ashore except wwhen I must.” On this he is firm. He comes ashore to hunt, just as he combs the seas, hunting. Neither of them are truly home. All of it is within his dreadful responsibility.

She takes one of the tiny knives from out of her vest and cuts her sign from the trim of her skirt. She holds the tiny scrap of leather out, and he takes it, haughtiness changing with protean swiftness to bemusement.

“You have a sweep to convince me,” she promises, and his face is beautiful when it is lit with hope. The lines of his duty fall from him. The arrogance evaporates for a moment. He tugs at his sleeve and nicks it with a claw, tries to rip it cleanly. It starts to shred and she offers him the knife. He cuts his sign from his cuff and offers it to her with her knife, handle first.

They know one another’s names, their signs, their ancestors. She knows his duty. He knows her fate. Little was off limits in the dim circle of the camp lantern.

They do not exchange screennames. This too is a hunt, and he will prove himself worthy. Her regard is his prize. That another might not think so reveals only that they do not know. He feels the edge of superiority return, the sense of rightness. If she is on the other side of it now, still the rest of the world stands in opposition to him. It is not so very different. It is not so very different at all.

*


	2. Another beginning, one that is also a middle, and not an end:

**Another beginning, one that is also a middle, and not an end:**

When they meet a sweep later, it is again in the cave with its twisting tunnels and dead ends, both above the water and below. When they lie in the cave again, in the low circle of light from the camp lantern, on a nest of blankets this time, and not merely her sleeping pad, they arrive as friends. They meet as lovers. Above them, far above them, above tons upon tons of rocks and open night sky, the moons are full and the night is full of song. Out past the estuary, a camp town is set up, already vending warm drinks and hot meats and sweets to tempt a sea-born lover.

He is still arrogant, bound to his hunting duties, bound for captaincy, so long as he can bear a grub as testimony of his fitness, so long as he can raise it until he Ascends. He is a sweep older, taller, stronger, more vicious. When he hunts now, he thinks of her, and returning each day to his screen full of her questions, her stories, her worries for her moirail, things she can tell no one else. The word for it is old. _Confidants_. Two who hold one another’s secrets like a matched set of locked boxes. Letting his worries from out his tight throat has been a relief. They fly out, they crawl out, they squirm. He lets them go and they leave him lighter.

They are not pale. She asks questions, but he does not have to answer. He asks questions, but she does not have to answer. That they do, that they both do, is freely given. It is the greatest gift he has ever received.

He shares more than linguistics and history. He shares more of himself than he does with anyone. It is not a proper flush quadrant, but they are not a proper flush couple. They are only frenemies, and fellow historians, and he will outlive her by an exponential amount if he does not die of something first.

She is still doomed, bound for the engines. Determined to leave something of herself behind, to miss nothing, to drink life to the dregs. She leaves no injustice behind, not when she can fix it, confront it, straighten it like a hand twitching a blanket straight. He loves that about her, even as he fears it.

She has been pitch-courted by a blue and turned him down. She could have done much with him, if she had allowed herself, if the blue had allowed it. He might have been her legacy. He might have been her engineer. He might have left her something of herself when she became the helmsman. But his pitch flirtations sometimes ventured flush and when they did she didn’t have to close her eyes to remember the sweep of lashes over flushed cheeks, the purrbeast nuzzles of a sea princeling in the clutch of the moons. And one cannot ask one’s kismesis to care for one’s moirail when one is gone. The blue was only an aisle of closed doors, and if there is one thing she cannot bear, it is halls upon halls of closed doors.

Aradia has long since fled the lowblood community hives of her childhood. She fled into the country and built her own hive, of her own psionics and sweat. And she dug her own mysteries and FLARPed her own stories and has dear friends whom she will miss, when she is dead, or gone, or they are.

Perhaps Eridan will be her legacy.

*

They make love the night before the first night of the twin moons, and perhaps he is older and perhaps the terrible burning has mercy when it is obeyed quickly, for he does not lose his words, not the first night, or the second, or the third.

They make love in the cave, on the nest of blankets. They make love in the water and she knows that she will never experience anything quite the same as this, the lap of the mostly still dark water as they create their own tides, the flutter of his delicate vulnerable gills against her arms, her hands. He is taller now, last sweep by half a head, now twice that.

The couples, and threesomes, and foursomes, and more, those on the beach are on the sand. They do not bare their gills for their passing lovers.

She drinks in his form with her eyes, feels his weight, the smell of his hair, his breath, his skin, his desire, and she closes her eyes and tries to fix them all together into a perfect moment, a perfect moment that, if all goes as well as it might, some distant night she will hang in the biowires but she can retreat here.

If he does the same, if he imagines affixing this moment into a memory palace, if he thinks traitorous thoughts that she is more a queen than many who might contend for such a title, he does not speak of it.

They both know.

Her eyes are closed now, tightly closed, and he can smell the prickling of tears. Time is marching onward, and Ascension will come some night regardless of love or fear or ferocity. But for now there is this moment, and this moment is theirs, theirs and no one else’s.

He croons a come-hither song, an old one with unnecessary flourishes of lost titles, and she laughs and rumbles back her own, ancient dialects almost entirely incomprehensible to one another in their time now known to both, just as there are little in-jokes and familiarities from the past sweep. By the time the usual ruckus is occurring on the beach, orgy and spectators and food vendors and all, they are already well absorbed in one another.

*

After two nights of lovemaking, his eyes are still clear when she returns her fertilized egg to him.

*


	3. A beginning, and an ending:

**A beginning, and an ending:**

The grub hatches violet and he tells her as much, tells her that it has her overcompensating horns and nose, that it spends a lot of time eating and crapping and trying very hard to roll over. It can’t swim worth a damn.

He has to carry it everywhere, in a sling as he hunts. And his lusus won’t shut up about his own grub-ass. He bitches, and the worries fall from him.

She laughs at him, and coos at their grub, tells it to come visit at the end of each of their calls, each of their chats, perigee after perigee. He understands she means that she’s inviting him and doesn’t think he’ll ever come. He doesn’t.

*

He doesn’t and it’s too late.

*


	4. An ending, and also a beginning:

**An ending, and also a beginning:**

She goes silent a perigee before the next twin spring moons. He messages her and there is no response. The grub quickly forgets her, or so he assumes, content as it is to eat, and crap, and follow him everywhere. In such close contact with a grub, with his own grub almost to first pupation, the moons have little impact on him, but spawning season is the nadir of seadweller aggression, it should do no harm to check. There is something in him that insists that it is not real until she fails to appear. Hope is for fairytales. Hope lies.

He will follow this hope until he can drown it.

He enters the cave, their cave, the night before first night, and turns his light off and he sits in the dark, and he listens. There is no one there.

The two of them sleep through the day, sharing fish when the grub wakes, and at nightfall there is a light, the sound of someone climbing and walking and twisting their way psionically through the cliff tunnels.

Then the light is there, and for a moment he thinks perhaps it is her. Who else would know?

The slender silhouette lowers the light and he knows she’s dead. He knew it before, but he can feel it now like a weight.

He has never grieved before. He takes lusii, but still has his own. He still has his duties and his grub. He has the appreciation of the Heiress, if not her interest beyond that.

The thin psionic lowers his light and they regard one another.

“You must be Sollux. She wwas so vvery pale for you.” It is the only thing he can think to say. The grub chirps at the light and makes as if to scamper toward it. He catches it back and it rears back as he reels it in. Its curly horns are obvious. It has her hair, wavy, but not yet long like hers. It has twinned blood stripes, like and not like his.

He wonders yet again what it will be like when it pupates, when it grows. Will it be a girl like her? Will it be fucking fearless and stupidly compassionate as an adult? He won’t know. He’ll have to surrender it to the caverns when he Ascends. They’ll match it with a lusus, it will forget him, just like it forgot her. He will be a captain. He will have a ship. He will command a crew and a helmsman. He doesn’t know when that became a sentence of its own and not merely a reprieve from his current sentence, his current duties.

“Fuck,” says the oh-so-eloquent not-stranger. “Fuck a bucket, I can’t believe thith.”

The grub chirps again and the psionic sits, almost collapses. He puts the light down, sand crunching, and grabs his hair at his temples and pulls, like he might fly off in all directions and shatter. It is a blatantly pale plea and the seadweller averts his eyes. It is aimed at no one, no one who can answer. How long have those thin fingers pulled at that short hair to no response, no hope of response, to no purpose?

Last sweep the princeling would have been angry at such disrespect, that this visitor does not see him as a threat, sits here as if they are not two sides of something missing a middle. It’s only the first day of spawning season, his arrogance would not have bled from him. Last sweep he had Aradia. Both of them did, in separate quadrants, but the empty shape is the same.

“Howw did it happen?” That’s the only thing he can think of. He knows when. When was when she stopped responding. He can even guess at where, she would leave her coordinates visible when they chatted, a sort of open invitation he never took up. There was no need to bring lusii-hunting to her door, no need to introduce his hundreds of potential revenge-cycles to her. She knew they were there. The potential revenge-cycles didn’t need to know anything of her. He wasn’t protecting her. He wasn’t shying away from showing this ugliest of sides to her. He wasn’t.

“Revenge-thycle.”

He sucks in his breath and wonders whom he needs to kill, embraces the cold stone of it like it might shelter him from this grief. He feels the growl in his chest and doesn’t remember making the decision to allow it.

“Thut up, it wathn’t one of yourth. FLARP thit. One nutcath went off, paralythed a frenemy. AA thent ghothth. Thpiderbitcth sent worth. Another frenemy got involved and blinded. Thpiderbitch ith down an arm and eye. Everyone go hive and mathturbate.”

The psionic laughs, bitter, almost hysterical. “I thought you were jutht a crazy FLARP thtory. AA liked crazy thit. Old thingth. Dangerouth and forbidden thingth. You really the current orphaner?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t even have to athk if that’th really her grub too. Thothe thupid hornth, they couldn’t come from anyone elth.” Thin lips twist and he wraps his arms around himself, as if to hold on, to hold himself together when the pieces only want to fly apart.

The seadweller sees weakness in another adult, another potential threat, and for the first time, he is not calculating how best to exploit it, how to reach the meat of it. He thinks he sees the shadow of her. She would have consoled her moirail. Who will hold him now? Who will take this wretched shaking piece of grief and see him to Ascension? (Would it be a kindness or an unkindness? When did it ever matter if it was outside his duties?)

She was never pitiable, never pitiful. Her fate might have inspired an answering anger in him, but she never asked it.

They lied and told one another that they were not flush, were not locked to one another, would not  hold one another to a quadrant. He never told her that he would not have felt entrapped. Now that she’s gone, he wants to tell her that he will give himself to her, the whole of himself, if only she will return.

“It’th not a joke, ith it? But the punchline’th thill on uth.”

It’s the “us” that gets him. They are alike, both less without her. He thinks about how he might have claimed her service, how he would have lost the grub anyhow, but he could have salvaged that much. It would have been a smaller ship, a courier really, she was precise but not that powerful. They talked about it, a few times, as if was some time far off and not a mere two sweeps, then one. He promised her that he would never order her and she knew that he meant it, even if he was also lying. She wouldn’t have listened anyhow, he would have made sure of that much, that her rig was comfortable and did not compel obedience.

He thinks of her and he does not know if it is a betrayal when he convinces her moirail to speak about her, to let out his rage and guilt and sorrow, at her involvement, at his involvement, at their loss. He holds her moirail against his shoulder and the grub does not understand why they are both crying. He wants to pull everything he never knew about her from her pale-love. He wants to comfort him as he’s never shushed another. It is not real, it is only… _circumstance_. It is only what she would have done and cannot. It is only for a little while. It is only for a night, perhaps two. (This is how it all started. Exceptions. Exceptional circumstances.)

He does not know that he can give up anything else. He owns little, and is jealous of its use. He does not know that he can give up another who knew her, not when no one else knows the shape of the empty place. Later. He will ask later. He will ask her other other-half his plans for Ascension, if he would willingly consent to a rig, his rig, if he asked only for his service and not his self, if there was a chance to reach space still preserving the shape of her, if only in the two edges bent around her absence.

Perhaps it is an unkindness. But who else does this one have if he is here now?

*

They take too long. It is daylight now, and he could leave but the psionic cannot. He shares the fish and the psionic wrinkles his nose and blows one apart trying to cook it. The grub is out of its mind with happiness at the sudden scavenger hunt and hunts every scrap down, all the way to a stranger’s lap.

A thin hand reaches out, and he tenses, alert suddenly in a way he was not when that hand was in reach of his own gills or eyes. The grub churrs as its mother’s moirail traces its horns. It is no hardship to a sea child when a few drops of saltwater fall upon it.

It is a beginning. 


End file.
